Refugee athletes are about to take the stage in Paris as record migration and a rise in far-right populism affect much of the world, with parties in many countries clamping down on immigration and asylum.
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00:00A little over a third of the Refugee Olympic team at the Paris Games are women.
00:06The female representation has continued to decline since the team's creation in 2015.
00:14While the International Olympic Committee emphasizes that this year's event will be
00:18the first gender-equal one in history, individual sports cases reveal a different story to the
00:25reality of the bigger picture.
00:28We're, you know, consistently promoting the achievements related to gender equality at
00:36the Games, but not then kind of enforcing or really requiring them of any national team,
00:46but even this refugee team over which they have control.
00:51The number of refugees has tripled just in the last decade.
00:55Around half of them are women and girls.
00:57In addition to poverty and other issues that all refugees may face, women refugees encounter
01:03an added layer of oppression caused by gender discrimination.
01:08So for some, having the number of women athletes reach almost 40% is an achievement that should
01:15be celebrated.
01:16I think we need to be really realistic that even the teams that are sending gender-equal
01:21teams to Paris, it doesn't mean that women's sport is somehow solved in those countries.
01:27So yeah, we would love to see a gender-equal refugee team at an Olympics in the future,
01:32of course we would.
01:34But I think for this time, we should really be celebrating the fact that, you know, these
01:38amazing women have made it this far.
01:40However, not everyone shares this opinion.
01:43I don't think it's enough.
01:44The teams at the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games can be used to raise awareness about
01:51and draw attention to the global refugee crisis that we have, should also be drawing
01:58attention to that not everybody has the same experiences of being a refugee, and that there
02:04are these increased risks and challenges for women, for gender minority folks, for disabled
02:12folks, right, as refugees, and that all of that does influence who then ultimately gets
02:18to be or is able to be part of the Refugee Olympic and Paralympic teams.
02:24The Olympic Refugee Foundation, which runs the team, states that a balanced representation
02:30in terms of sport, gender and regions is taken into consideration, and to be legible, athletes
02:36must be elite competitors in their respective sport and be refugees in their host country,
02:42recognized by the UN Refugee Agency.
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